The mornings during Thanksgiving weekend saw some sub-freezing temperatures which made starting our hayride tractors a little harder.
(Pictured: Daniel Perkins (left) and Josh Choitz (right) seated in one of the three wagons making rounds at the tree farm)
Daniel Perkins, who along with Josh Choitz and Luke Baxter, is one of the tractor drivers as well as the chief mechanic and maintenance officer for Minter’s Tree Farm.
Like most good mechanics he’s loath to use starting fluid, or ether as its commonly known, to get a diesel engine to start in the cold as its use tends to damage cylinder walls and make engines even harder to start.
But even Daniel had to use a few whiffs from the “ether bunny” to get our old Ford 5000s going. (They are over 50 years old.)
It reminded me of one Thanksgiving weekend back in the day when as a teenager I was hired by my great-uncle John Burch Harp, “Uncle Johnny” to me to drive a Ford 3000 during corn harvest. (This was back in the early 1970s, when Ricky Harp (John Burch’s grandson) and I earned the princely sum of $5 per day for driving tractors.)
(pictured: Uncle Johnny helped us butcher a deer my brother Rob (right) shot the first time he went deer hunting. It was a big one. My cool hat was a hand-me-down from Larry Bailey.)
One icy cold morning the 3000 wouldn’t start, even though it was relatively new at the time. We ended up draining the oil out of the engine, heating it in a metal pan over a wood fire, then pouring it back in the engine.
That took a while, but it did the trick.
We picked corn that day in a field on the east side of Highway 92, just below Harp’s Crossing.
The rows were long, running parallel to the highway.
Pluett Stanley ran the two-row picker, which was mounted on a two-cylinder John Deere tractor. I believe it was either a Model 60 or 70.
An elevator on the back of the tractor dumped the ears of corn, with most of the shucks intact, into a four-wheel wagon that held 50 bushels of ear corn or 150 of shelled.
My job was to bring an empty wagon and meet Pluett when he had filled the wagon. I’d get off my tractor and unhook the full wagon and get him hooked up to the empty one and back on his way.
Then I’d pull the full wagon to the road, where someone with a pickup truck, usually Uncle Johnny or one of his brothers Big Bill or Uncle Donald, would meet me and we would unhook an empty wagon and then hook the full wagon to the pickup.
From there they’d take the corn to a barn, or sometimes an old house, where some workers would unload the corn into a place of dry storage.
I loved that job, and welcomed any opportunity to do it. I remember how patient Pluett was with me when I was figuring out just how he liked to make the swap of wagons. And I recall how good that freshly picked dry corn smelled.
I think about those days a lot when I’m on the tractor here at the Christmas tree farm, pulling wagons and carrying tree customers to the field and bringing them and their trees back to our sales barn.
Happy Holidays everyone.